Saturday, January 05, 2008

Top 20 of 2007: #11 The Irredeemable Ant-Man

Supposedly The Irredeemable Ant-Man failed because it featured an unlikeable protagonist in former SHIELD agent Eric O'Grady. Screw that! It failed because of all the idiots who didn't buy it. Yes, I'm calling you an idiot if you didn't buy this comic. I'm like Eric O'Grady; I'm unlikeable.

Here's why you're an idiot (if you didn't buy the comic):

1) Phil Hester is really good, and you should buy anything he works on, unless it's written by Judd Winick, which this was not.

2) Robert Kirkman is really good, especially when he gets to do his own thing, which he basically got to do here. Have you read Invincible? Then you know he's good, no matter how you felt about Marvel Zombies (which I enjoyed, by the way).

3) Ant-Man is tiny, and he can talk to ants. And he helped beat up the Taskmaster in that Avengers issue I read the cover off of back when I was a kid. I don't care that this is a new character. Ant-Man still kicks ass.

4) This comic was like no other comic published by Marvel or DC recently. You complain about how everything is the same, but yet a super-hero comic with a unique sensibility comes along, and do you buy it? No, you buy Wolverine: Origins instead. It's your fault. All of it.

5) You were probably waiting for the trade. Dick.

6) You downloaded the comic illegally. Dick.

7) You don't like comics involving SHIELD, Damage Control, Ms. Marvel naked, or the Black Fox. In which case, you don't know what you're missing, because all of those things are good.

8) You want the world to be a suckier place, so you purposely don't support anything that might be entertaining and slightly original and fun. Why are you such a hater?

So, it's almost too late for you, if you didn't originally read it. I think it wasn't even collected into a trade, was it? Just like two digests, or something? Digests take comics designed for a certain size and then squish them down to make them look more like Manga, as if that fools anyone. All it does is make the pages look worse and the font too small.

Your job is to buy all the back issues, read them, then write thousands of letters to Kirkman and Hester and Marvel telling them how sorry you are. You ruined it.

I can only pray Eric O'Grady, aka SHIELD's finest agent becomes the breakout star of The Initiative and stops the entire Secret Invasion himself just cause he figures it'll get him some chicks if he does.

About Me

Timothy Callahan is an educator and a writer. He has written books, like Grant Morrison: The Early Years, and edited books like Teenagers from the Future. He used to co-host the weekly Splash Page podcast, but now he mostly spends his free time creating role-playing games like CRAWLJAMMER and the upcoming SUPERWAR.